No ivory tower necessary for international scholar Kyle Peerless ’15. To him, academic inquiry and service learning are incomplete without active cultural engagement. Peerless is a recent recipient of a fellowship from the Congress-­Budenstag Youth Exchange for Young Professionals (CBYX). This coveted fellowship entails a year of educational and occupational immersion, co-funded through the United States and German governments, that promotes cross­-cultural learning and diplomacy between our nations.

Throughout his academic career, Peerless has devoted countless hours to learning and working with and through other cultures. During the summer of his junior year, he interned at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) in Dübendorf, Switzerland through a 2014 ThinkSwiss Grant, an experience that taught him “the tremendous value of cultural exchange and international experience.”

Peerless has also committed himself extensively to service learning. During the 2014­-15 academic year, he was a member of the LMU men’s service organization, Magis, and a student leader of De Colores Service Immersion Trips to La Casa Del Migrante, a Tijuana shelter for recently deported immigrants. He is equally involved in academic life in his own community, serving as an operative member of Tau Beta Pi, LMU’s Engineering Honors Society, teaching assistant in the Mathematics Department, and mechanical engineering research assistant, contributions which have earned him several awards including the Slattery­Burns Engineering Merit Scholarship in 2011 and the John P. Daly, S.J., Summer Scholarships for Cultural Immersion in 2013.

The value of working in a community, be it at home or abroad, for Peerless is the pivotal transformation of issues into individual face stories.